


Periodically Puzzled

by dontwatchmechange



Category: Sanders Sides, Thomas Sanders
Genre: In-Universe RPF, M/M, except we don't know anx's name yet, logan likes big words and he cannot lie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-30
Updated: 2017-07-30
Packaged: 2018-12-08 20:26:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11654109
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dontwatchmechange/pseuds/dontwatchmechange
Summary: Thomas is busy. Morality takes advantage.Also: how Logan got his flashcards.





	Periodically Puzzled

Logan pulled off his headphones, relatively sure there had just been a knock at the door; or, perhaps, someone was yelling for him just outside.

“Who’s there?” called Logan.

“Noah!”

“Noah?” he repeated. He wasn’t even aware one of the gang was named Noah. Based on the underlying wordplay in the names he did know, he’d actually expect it to be himself. Perhaps Anxiety, but he wouldn’t knock. “Noah who?”

The voice giggled. “Noah way to open this door?”

“Three and a half seconds,” he replied, and before Morality could get to a fourth Mississippi, the door clicked and swung open. “Your name is Patton, right? It seems as if I get a new answer every time I speak to you.”

“Aw, you’ll catch on, smartypants.”

He reached to pinch Logan’s cheek. Logan did not take kindly to it.

“Why are you here?” he asked, looking back at his wall clock, sharp and white like the ones they once saw in classrooms. It was meant to be a quiet evening.

“Oh! Thomas is watching a show finale and Princey and Anxiety are fighting over how it’ll end.”

“They’ll work that out without us,” Logan dismissed, heading back to his ergonomically designed couch.

“Exactly!” said Patton. “So I thought we could hang.”

“Hang?”

He looked around Logan’s shelves, which might have been okay if Patton looked with his eyes and not his hands. “Yeah, hang out. You and me. Chill.”

Logan protested. “I know my room is a crisp 20 degrees Celsius, but it’s not exactly a refrigerator.”

Patton dug around haphazardly, stumbling upon a nicely organized stack of puzzles. “We can do one of these! That’ll be lit.”

Logan took a small step back, then a decisive, large step forward. “You’re not lighting up a puzzle. I don’t trust you with fire, or sparks, or anything remotely electrical after your game day video.”

“No, silly goose, I meant-” Patton grew exasperated, as Logan only became more confused. “You’re a very smart guy, Logan. You know all kinds of things I would never remember.”

“I sense that there’s a ‘but’ coming.”

He giggled again. “Butt! You said butt.”

Heaven help him. Help them both.

Patton averted his eyes, focusing on the jigsaws rather than directly confronting Logan. “You do have some trouble keeping up in some conversations. You get a little… puzzled.” Patton picked up an old box, showing a table of the elements. “Periodically.”

He sat down on the floor cross-legged, dumped out all of the pieces carelessly, and patted the space next to him, smiling brightly.

“I’m-” Logan stopped and started again. “I was just trying to listen to NPR on a perfectly ordinary binge-watching evening, and now you’re on my floor flinging around scientifically outdated toys and insulting my vernacular. You’re like the Cat in the Hat.”

“Ooh, would you say I’m…” Patton held up a corner piece as bait. “...harshing your mellow?”

“That is a nonsensical and meaningless phrase.”

“It means to disrupt someone’s state of positivity unexpectedly.” Patton gasped as he heard himself. “I SOUND SO SMART IN HERE.”

Reluctantly, Logan walked back to the nearest desk for a notecard and an oversized black pen. “Marshing a mallow, you said?”

Patton repeated it, spelled it out, and made certain that Logan got his flashcard right.

He scanned his work, confident in his knowledge of the phrase. “Yes, Patton, you are absolutely harshing my mellow.”

Patton squealed. “Forget the puzzle. I’m teaching you more words.”

“I don’t need a vocab lesson,” he argued as he searched through the box for another corner, or at least an edge. “I know everything I need to know.”

“No need to be so salty.”

He got up again abruptly to grab another flashcard. “Now is that derived from the similar metaphorical translations of ‘bitter’ and ‘sweet,’ or does it have a different etymology altogether?”

-

“So if I said I was ‘literally dying,’ how would you respond?”

Logan kept one part of his brain busy on the puzzle and the other on Patton’s little game. Multitasking was stimulating. “I’d… recognize that you were having an overly emotional response to something benign, and consequently get as far away from you as possible.”

Patton leaned over the half-finished puzzle and hugged Logan suddenly and tightly, pushing over Logan’s stacks of similar-looking pieces. “I am so proud of you.”

Like this. This was exactly the sort of thing he was talking about.

“Hey, if you two four-eyed, blue-clad lovebirds could drop it a minute,” called Anxiety from his usual corner on the stairs - though Logan didn’t notice him showing up. “Thomas is cycling through Netflix, and, apparently, ‘it doesn’t matter what you watch, it’ll still be better than anything you could ever create’ isn’t getting through, so you’re up, I guess.”

Logan nodded. “Thank you for alerting us, Anxiety, that’s very extra of you.”

Anxiety’s mouth fell open.

“Did I say that right? I feel like I said that right.”

“Al-almost,” stuttered Patton. “Next time.”

“Morality,” said Anxiety disparagingly. “You know you can’t teach an old nerd new tricks.”

“Well, I can try!” He put an arm around Logan and tapped his nose. “And trying your best is all that matters, isn’t it, Logan?”

Logan wasn’t dumbstruck. He merely chose not to dignify the situation with a response.

Anxiety smirked, which was always very unsettling. “Hey, you two heard of Urban Dictionary?”

“NO,” said Roman, popping in. “No. No. No. Don’t listen to Scary Spice, he’ll ruin you.”

“Okay, Your Royal Obnoxiousness,” Anxiety snarked, “get out of Teach’s room before it gets in your head. You’ll get caught up in the Pixar theory again and we’ll all have to listen to it.”

“It’s essentially confirmed that it’s all one storyline.” He caught sight of the stack in Logan’s hand. “Is that a flashcard with the definition of ‘turnt?’”

“Yeeeahhh! Check it out!” Patton pointed, finally freeing Logan from his arms. “The master has become the student.”

Logan took a meditative breath. “Patton insists on teaching me a more informal vocabulary.”

Roman gave Anxiety a side glance. “Do you have ‘bye, Felicia?’”

It sounded familiar, but not familiar enough. He shuffled through.

Anxiety scoffed at the cards. “YOLO? Really? That stuff’s so old, even adults only use it ironically.”

“We’re twenty-nine,” said Logan skeptically.

Roman pulled the reins on an imaginary horse. “Woah. That can’t possibly be true.”

“Now, now,” scolded Patton. “We’re all still working our way towards adultery.”

Anxiety pushed his way in between the two of them, staring a little too intently at Logan. “Do not let this man teach you.” He took a blank card and the pen out of Patton’s hand and started to write a new vocabulary word.

Roman picked up another card, pulling a quill-shaped pen seemingly out of nowhere. “I always have to come to the rescue around here.”

“Oh, good!” Patton clapped once in approval, folding his fingers together and resting his hands under his chin. “We’re all working together!”

“No, we’re not,” said Roman and Anxiety at once.

Logan watched helplessly as his colleagues filled in flashcards. He could sort of read Anxiety’s through the back, with the size of his surprisingly legible writing, but it eluded him how “shipping” was anything other than a method of delivering goods.

“Can I at least teach you three some real words?” asked Logan timidly. “For instance, ‘overbearing?’”

Over the chatter, they heard the when-you-wish-upon-a-star theme from Thomas’s computer.

Roman grinned triumphantly and sank down slowly. “See, he listens to me when you’re all playing the 25th Annual Patton County Spelling Bee.”

“I should probably go, um, remind them of Disney plotholes,” said Anxiety, following Roman.

Logan scooped up the cards left behind, reading the peculiar phrases he’d heard in passing but never quite understood.

“Oh, that’s not true.” Patton snatched away a card or two in Anxiety’s handwriting. “‘BAE’ does not stand for ‘Bane of All Existence.’”

“Shame,” he said, glancing at the spaces where Anxiety and Roman had been. “I could have used that. What is it?”

“Well, supposedly, it stands for ‘Before Anyone Else.’”

“Well, you showed up here before anyone else,” Logan reasoned, “so you were BAE?”

He couldn’t work out why Patton was smiling so wide. “Um, yeah. That’s perfect.”

“It’s a good thing you’re also here after everyone else.”

“Wait. Really?”

Logan passed a handful of puzzle pieces Patton’s way. “Finish what you started, Mendeleev.”

“Who?”

“He assembled the periodic table, so I was providing commentary on your ambition to replicate the situation. In the form of the puzzle.”

Patton gasped. “IT WAS A JOKE?”

“An analogy,” he countered. “A witty comparison at worst.”

“YOU MA-”

“Chill,” said Logan calmly, without even looking at his cards, and Patton was so happy that he actually did.

-

“We’re missing ununseptium.” Logan frantically searched the box, his pockets, everywhere for the final pieces.

Patton made his I-know-something-you-don’t face, which Logan had seen quite enough of today.

“What.”

“Weeelllll, you said the puzzle was out of date, so I checked what it should say, and guess what that 117 thing is?”

Logan’s hands flew to his cheeks in an excitement he reserved for new elements and new books. “Has it been named?”

“A few months ago. Tennessine!”

Patton handed a few pieces back, pieces that should have been blank. As he put them into the puzzle, they formed doodles of the four of them, Anxiety and Roman in red and Logan and Patton in blue, filled into corners of the square in what almost looked like a coat of arms around the abbreviation.

“Look, it’s- because it’s TS, and that’s like-”

“I get it. That’s very…” He searched his cards. He knew this. “Woke? Is it woke?”

Patton hesitated. “A for effort.”

Even if it was as new, crudely created, and !extremely out of place as these doodles, Logan decided slang might be able to fit into the bigger picture just as easily as the pieces completed the puzzle. And maybe, if he’d thought to look up element 117 before anyone else, Patton could fit into Logan’s picture a little better than he thought.

“You too,” said Logan. “BAE.”


End file.
